In March the Chelsea City Council did something unusual. It took an advocacy group’s list of demands about federal immigration enforcement, put the police chief and the city solicitor in a room, and went through the demands one at a time in public. The minutes of that meeting are the clearest account anyone has of what Chelsea actually does when Immigration and Customs Enforcement operates in the city, and what it declines to do.
The petition came from the LUCE Immigrant Justice Network of Massachusetts and was titled “ICE Out of Chelsea.” Council President Roberto Jimenez-Rivera called the Conference subcommittee together on March 10 and said he intended to take each item in turn and let the city and LUCE both speak. Police Chief Keith Houghton and City Solicitor Cheryl Watson Fisher answered. The meeting ran from 6:04 to 7:11 p.m.
Seven demands, seven answers
Keep ICE off city property. Already the practice, the city said. Chelsea does not allow ICE to use municipal property for staging, and does not allow agents into non-public areas of city buildings without a warrant. School buildings are run by the School Department, not the city, but the superintendent has a similar policy. Charter schools are outside the city’s jurisdiction entirely.
End “peaceful transfers.” Declined. This is the practice in which, when someone is released from police custody and ICE agents are waiting outside, officers walk the person out to them. Houghton said Chelsea follows a model used by the district and superior courts, that police do not hold anyone longer than necessary after bail is posted, and that when agents are outside the station the department believes a peaceful handover “ensures the safety of everyone involved.” LUCE wanted it stopped. It was not.
Stop fingerprinting juveniles and sharing prints federally. Partly done, and partly impossible. The department has discretion with juveniles and has chosen not to fingerprint them except in cases involving felony violence. But once anyone is fingerprinted, the chief said, every state and federal agency receives the information and there is no way to stop that alert.
Stop sharing license plate data with out-of-state and federal agencies. Already city policy. The minutes state that the department uses the Flock license plate reading system, “which they indicate has served an invaluable role in solving many of the City’s most recent homicides,” and that the city “has a policy in place that prohibits the sharing of license plate data with any law enforcement agencies outside the state of Massachusetts, including federal agencies.” Boston published a report this week showing that its own contractual prohibition on sharing was defeated by a vendor setting within three days, which is why that answer deserves a second look.
Write the rules into ordinance. The solicitor said the city is already barred from collaborating directly with ICE, and that the city cannot stop anyone from filing a public records request. She noted ICE has never asked the police department to set up traffic control for an operation, and that outside of arrests the department does not assist ICE with traffic control.
Limit officer contact with ICE to the minimum required by law. Declined. The department said an open line of communication matters, and gave an example: the chief called ICE to confirm no enforcement action would take place during Chelsea Day. The department also said it cannot govern officers’ personal interactions, particularly off duty.
Pass resolutions supporting state action. The council has done versions of this. Councillor Tanairi Garcia’s resolution supporting immigrant families passed 9 to 0 in February.
The executive order that followed
Six days before that meeting, on March 4, City Manager Fidel Maltez signed an executive order titled “An Executive Order To Protect Chelsea Residents From Unconstitutional and Violent Federal Operations.” He told the council Chelsea had joined Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, Lynn, Newton and Somerville at a February 5 press event, attended by the Suffolk and Middlesex district attorneys.
The order recites that the council designated Chelsea a sanctuary city in 2007 and reaffirmed it in 2017, and that the police department “does not take part in or assist with federal immigration enforcement operations.” It then directs four things.
City property, including buildings, parks and parking lots, may not be used “as a staging area, processing location, operations base, or any similar purpose in furtherance of civil immigration enforcement operations.” Federal agents may not enter nonpublic city spaces without a judicial warrant or court order. If anyone is injured during an immigration enforcement action, city officials must summon emergency medical services immediately.
The fourth is the one with teeth. Citing the state police accountability statute and the POST Commission’s use-of-force regulation, the order directs that if a Chelsea officer sees any law enforcement official using force beyond what is necessary or objectively reasonable, that officer “shall intervene to prevent the observed official’s use of unnecessary or unreasonable force, regardless of the rank of the observed official or the agency for which the official works,” unless intervening would cause imminent harm. In plain terms: a Chelsea patrol officer is directed to step in on a federal agent using excessive force.
The order’s scope section pulls back. Nothing in it, it says, restricts “the lawful conduct of civil immigration enforcement,” and nothing confers on city employees any authority to enforce or supervise compliance with the order itself. The section numbering jumps from 5 to 9.
What it adds up to
Chelsea’s position is more concrete than the word sanctuary usually conveys, and narrower than the petition asked for. The city controls its own property, its own buildings and its own officers’ conduct, and it has written those controls down. It does not control what happens on the sidewalk outside the police station, what the fingerprint databases do, or what a federal agency does with information once it has it.
That distinction runs through every answer the chief gave. In a city where nearly half of residents were born outside the United States, and where the state’s PROTECT Act took effect in August, the difference between what the city decides and what the city merely observes is the whole of the policy.